y that we shall have a skirmish this
afternoon. The troops have just been called out."

"BARCELONA, June 1.

"I have just arrived here after leaving my niece in San Baudilio de
Llobregat. The director of the establishment has assured me that the
case is incurable. She will, however, have the greatest care in that
cheerful and magnificent sanitarium. My dear friend, if I also should
ever succumb, let me be taken to San Baudilio. I hope to find the proofs
of my 'Genealogies' awaiting me on my return. I intend to add six pages
more, for it would be a great mistake not to publish my reasons for
maintaining that Mateo Diez Coronel, author of the 'Metrico Encomio,'
is descended, on the mother's side, from the Guevaras, and not from the
Burguillos, as the author of the 'Floresta Amena' erroneously maintains.

"I write this letter principally for the purpose of giving you a
caution. I have heard several persons here speaking of Pepe Rey's death,
and they describe it exactly as it occurred. The secret of the manner of
his death, which I learned some time after the event, I revealed to you
in confidence when we met in Madrid. It has appeared strange to me that
having told it to no one but yourself, it should be known here in all
its details--how he entered the garden; how he fired on Caballuco when
the latter attacked him with his dagger; how Ramos then fired on him
with so sure an aim that he fell to the ground mortally wounded. In
short, my dear friend, in case you should have inadvertently spoken of
this to any one, I will remind you that it is a family secret, and that
will be sufficient for a person as prudent and discreet as yourself.

"Joy! joy! I have just read in one of the papers here that Caballuco had
defeated Brigadier Batalla."

"ORBAJOSA, December 12.

"I have a sad piece of news to give you. The Penitentiary has ceased to
exist for us; not precisely because he has passed to a better life, but
because the poor man has been, ever since last April, so grief-stricken,
so melancholy, so taciturn that you would not know him. There is no
longer in him even a trace of that Attic humor, that decorous and
classic joviality which made him so pleasing. He shuns every body; he
shuts himself up in his house and receives no one; he hardly eats any
thing, and he has broken off all intercourse with the world. If you were
to see him now you would not recognize him, for he is reduced to skin
and bone. The strangest par